Posts from the Car-Sharing Category

In many major American cities, communities of color have worse access to car-share and bike-share than majority white neighborhoods. Chart: Shared Use Mobility Center

Car-share and bike-share services are making it easier to go without owning a car in American cities, but access to “shared-use” systems remains limited in communities of color compared to majority-white neighborhoods, according to a new analysis from the Shared Use Mobility Center [PDF].

SUMC’s map of where car-share and bike-share would be most useful in Portland.

SUMC developed a method to analyze which places have the most potential for car-share and bike-share usage across 27 American metros. Areas with relatively high transit ridership, low car ownership, and small blocks (which enhance walkability) are where share-use systems can be most useful, according to SUMC.

SUMC then compared these areas of “opportunity” for car-share and bike-share to areas where the services are actually available. In many cities, SUMC observed that dense low-income neighborhoods lack access to shared-use systems even though they have the necessary characteristics for success:

While they have been often passed over by private operators, these neighborhoods have many of the key qualities — including high population density, transit access, and walkability — needed to support shared-use systems. Additionally, the opportunity to scale up shared modes in these neighborhoods is especially compelling since they stand to profit most from the benefits of shared mobility, including reduced household transportation costs and increased connectivity to jobs and opportunities outside the immediate community.

A clear racial disparity is apparent in many cities. In Chicago, for instance, 72 percent of low-income, majority-white neighborhoods have access to shared-use systems, according to SUMC’s analysis, but only 48 percent of low-income communities of color do. The disparity persists regardless of income levels. In well-off majority-white Chicago neighborhoods, 77 percent of households have access to car-share or bike-share, compared to just 49 percent in affluent majority-minority neighborhoods.

Not all cities have these disparities, but the pattern is alarmingly common.

This afternoon, Council Member Mark Levine will introduce a bill [PDF 1, 2] requiring DOT to give car-share companies designated on-street parking spaces, potentially for a price. Guaranteed parking would boost car sharing, Levine says, and reduce car ownership. Trouble is, there’s not much data to say whether or not car-share in New York is reducing vehicle ownership or just encouraging more driving.

After 280,000 trips in Brooklyn in less than a year, has Car2Go led to more driving, or less? We still don’t know. Photo: Elvert Barnes/Flickr

Levine introduced the bill days after Car2Go announced an expansion into western Queens. The company, owned by auto giant Daimler, offers a fleet of 450 Smart cars in a 36 square-mile zone covering the western half of Brooklyn, from Greenpoint to Coney Island. Starting August 29, the company is adding another 100 vehicles and eight square miles in Long Island City, Astoria, Woodside, and Sunnyside. Customers of the point-to-point service can start and end trips in any free curbside parking space.

“The focus area of Car2Go in New York currently is in Brooklyn-Queens connections, where there’s little to no subway links,” Levine said. “I strongly believe this is ultimately a substitute for car ownership. In the outer boroughs, the further you get from the Central Business District, the more car ownership increases because the transit links are weaker.”

There isn’t enough research to back or refute Levine’s intuition. That’s for two reasons. First, most scholarship has focused on round-trip services like Zipcar, whose customers start and finish their trips in the same parking spot. Second, there isn’t much data on cities with New York’s level of density, transit service, and low car ownership rates.

Susan Shaheen, a car-share expert at the University of California, Berkeley, said car-share has a varied impact, depending on each customer’s circumstances. “Many individuals will drive marginally more,” she said in an email. “Other individuals will drive substantially less, as they alter their relationship with the private auto to one of necessity rather than convenience.”

With fleets of vehicles for “mobility services” replacing personal vehicles, KPMG predicts that the total number of cars on American roads could start to decline. Image: KPMG

Bailey Mareu, 30, and her husband were looking for ways to save money after she left her job to help run the family business in Lawrence, Kansas, two years ago.

So they decided to downsize from two cars to one. The Mareus were both working from home most days, and they were just a mile-and-a-half walk from the shops and restaurants of downtown Lawrence.

“It just kind of made sense financially,” said Mareu. “We decided to sell my car because it has the higher loan amount on it.”

What Mareu and her husband did might be the wave of the future, according to the automotive division of consulting giant KPMG. While predicting continued global growth in car sales as countries like India and China become more affluent, KPMG’s recent white paper about trends affecting the car industry [PDF] sees different forces at work in the United States.

In the U.S., says KPMG, car sharing companies like Zipcar, on-demand car services like Uber, and even bike-share will eat away at the percentage of households owning multiple vehicles, especially in major cities. Today, 57 percent of American households have two or more vehicles. KPMG’s Gary Silberg told CNBC that the share of two-car households could decrease to 43 percent by 2040.

In this scenario, KPMG predicts that the rise of “mobility services” will displace car ownership by providing similar mobility but without the fixed costs. The typical new car now costs $31,000 but sits idle 95 percent of the time. Given other options, Silberg told CNBC, many Americans will be happy to avoid that burden.

Point-to-point car-share service Car2Go will launch next month across the western third of Brooklyn. One of the questions hanging over the launch was whether the company would pay the city to let its customers park for free at metered spaces. Now we have an answer: DOT will not change its parking rules to accommodate Car2Go, whose customers will have to pay to use metered spaces. In areas with a high concentration of meters, the company will secure private off-street parking for its users.

Car2Go will operate on NYC’s residential streets, which offer free parking. The city hasn’t made a deal with the company for metered spaces. Photo: Car2Go

On October 25, Car2Go will launch operations with 400 vehicles across a 36-square-mile zone covering much of northwest Brooklyn, as well as areas west of Coney Island Avenue and Ocean Parkway. Customers can end their trips at any legal parking space anywhere within the zone, with a few exceptions.

Parking lanes that become moving lanes during rush hour are a no-no. On streets that are swept four days a week, customers can’t park if the sweeping is less than 12 hours away. If the street is swept twice a week, customers can leave a vehicle no more than 24 hours before sweeping.

The company also usually pays local governments to let customers use metered parking for free, either to run errands or to end their journey in a metered spot.

Offering a pass on meters negates the purpose of parking prices — to ensure turnover. If a Car2Go user closes out a trip at a meter, there’s no guarantee that another customer will hop in the vehicle a short time later.

Car2Go, a subsidiary of automotive giant Daimler AG, is hiring staff and preparing to launch in Brooklyn after more than a year of negotiations with the city, bringing point-to-point car-share to NYC for the first time. Car2Go will also be the first car-share company in the city to store its vehicles on the street, though the specifics of the arrangement with the city, such as the price the company will pay for curb access, have yet to be made public.

Car2Go appears almost ready for a Brooklyn launch after more than a year of negotiations with DOT. Photo: ElliottBrown/Flickr

What differentiates Car2Go from other car-share services in New York is that users can make one-way trips. (Zipcar, a competitor, is getting into the one-way car-share game in other cities, but does not currently offer the service here.) The added flexibility could entice more car-owning New Yorkers to give up their private vehicles, though it’s tough to say whether this effect will outweigh the additional driving trips made by households without cars, which are the majority in NYC.

The other intriguing aspect of Car2Go is that its fleet of Smart Cars will be stored on the street. To close out a one-way trip, members must park on the street anywhere within the Car2Go service area. These zones are usually quite large: The company says it’s looking to cover Brooklyn before expanding to other boroughs. (It’s not clear whether the service will ever come to Manhattan, where transit coverage is superb, cabs are plentiful, and competition for curb space is most intense.)

Since the vehicles are located curbside, the company has to work out a host of issues with the city. “New York is not unique,” said Car2Go business development manager Josh Moskowitz. “There’s street sweeping, there are meters, there are rush hour restrictions.” Car2Go operates in 15 cities in the U.S. and Canada, as well as 12 European cities. In each, the company reached an agreement with the local government and prohibits users from parking 24 hours before street sweeping or in an area with rush hour restrictions.

One of the downsides to these agreements is that they mask the cost of metered spaces from customers, who are allowed to park in those spaces as if they are free because Car2Go compensates cities for foregone meter revenue. A Car2Go customer can end a one-way trip by parking in a metered spot without paying extra. While another customer might soon drive that car away, the practice still raises questions about how Car2Go vehicles will affect curb occupancy and traffic congestion in commercial areas.

So when will Car2Go launch? “We don’t have any rough timelines right now,” Moskowitz said. “We’re moving closer.”

Update: “DOT has had preliminary conversations with Car2Go regarding their service,” said a DOT spokesperson. “There have been no formal negotiations and no agreement has been reached between Car2Go and DOT for a Car2Go launch within New York City.”

According to a spate of recentstudies, Millennials — a bigger generation than the Baby Boomers — are driving less than their parents did. But the underlying reasons are a matter of some dispute. Will younger Americans start happily motoring again once the economy is really humming, or is a lasting generational shift underway?

According to user surveys, Washington, D.C.'s Capital Bikeshare has reduced driving by its members 4.4 million miles since the program began. Image: Creative Commons

The U.S. PIRG and the Frontier Group teamed up last year to make the case that the “driving boom” is truly over, and today they’re out with a report that examines how new technologies are making it easier for young Americans to drive less. “A New Way to Go” focuses on how communications technology has enabled transportation advances like ride-sharing apps and real-time transit arrival data that make it easier for people to drive less and avoid car ownership.

“For Baby Boomers, driving one’s car represented freedom and spontaneity,” said Phineas Baxandall at U.S. PIRG. “Today — especially for younger people — owning a car is likely to represent big expenses and parking hassles. Meanwhile, technology and vehicle-sharing are making it easier not to own a car or for households to drive less. Public transit systems, especially with on-board wi-fi and real-time apps, can be the backbone of this new mobility.”

PIRG and the Frontier Group argue that smartphones and mobile communications have helped increase the relative competitiveness of transit compared to driving. Not only do these technologies make it possible to work and socialize while riding transit, they also make transit more convenient. Real time arrival data, where available, takes the guesswork out of waiting for the bus or the train: The introduction of real time bus location information in Chicago was shown to increase weekday ridership between 2006 and 2009, PIRG reports.

Meanwhile, with the growth of services bike-share, car-share, and even phone-assisted taxi hailing apps like Uber increasing point-to-point travel options, it’s easier for people to forego car ownership. As of 2012, more than 800,000 Americans were members of a car-share service.

The report notes that many of these new services and technologies “are still in their infancy” — the full effects aren’t apparent yet.

U.S. PIRG and the Frontier Group note several ways that policy makers can help unlock the potential of new transportation and communications technologies: opening transit data to third-party developers, adding wi-fi and cellular service on all transit vehicles, updating regulations to enable vehicle sharing, and, of course, making the core investments to create convenient, reliable transit systems.

“We’re not in a position to rest on our laurels,” said Peter Varda, chair of the American Public Transportation Association and CEO of the Interurban Transit Partnership, AKA “The Rapid” in Grand Rapids, on a conference call with reporters today. “Millennials generally want a broader range of transportation options. We must be ready for them.”

Many New Yorkers are familiar with car-sharing services — like Zipcar, Hertz Connect, Enterprise CarShare, and Carpingo — that charge by the hour or day, with a reserved space where customers must start and finish a round-trip rental. Daimler-owned Car2Go operates differently: it charges by the minute or hour, and is focused on one-way rentals, allowing users to return a car to any on-street space within the company’s service area. The company, already operating in ten North American markets, is eyeing New York.

A Car2Go vehicle in the UK advertises free parking for customers -- but the company actually pays a significant amount to cities in order to use curb space. Photo: Elliott Brown on Flickr

“In the last few months, Car2Go has met with several New York City community groups, as well as NYC DOT,” Car2Go East Coast business development manager Josh Moskowitz said in an e-mail. Those meetings included a presentation to the transportation committee of Brooklyn Community Board 7, which covers Windsor Terrace and Sunset Park, indicating that the company is looking beyond Manhattan.

While the potential entry of point-to-point car-sharing to New York has implications for transportation behavior (Will it induce more car trips? Will it encourage households to go car-free?), it also raises another important question: How much is a parking spot worth?

When it launched a 200-car fleet in Washington, DC, last year, Car2Go paid the local government $578,000 annually, or $2,890 per car. The payment granted its users unlimited access to all residential permit zones and metered spaces at no direct cost, though the cars are still subject to rush-hour and street-sweeping restrictions. (The District government’s car-share manager at the time was Josh Moskowitz, before Car2Go hired him.)

It’s not just general access to the curb that’s being sold for thousands of dollars each year. Car-share services are also paying cities for specific parking spots. In 2010, the DC government auctioned off 86 curbside parking spaces to car-share companies, fetching an average of $3,485 for each space, according to TBD.com.

Instead of an auction, San Francisco has opted to give car-share services access to hundreds of spaces in exchange for set fees. High-demand areas would command higher prices; as a result, the city expects to earn anywhere from $600 to $2,700 for each space annually. In Los Angeles, the city has entered into an agreement with Hertz in which the company pays at least $1,500 per space each year [PDF].

In a sign of the increasing market for car-sharing, Avis car rental is expected to purchase Zipcar today for a tidy $500 million. With the acquisition, the car rental giant will begin offering short-term car rentals, as have competitors Global and Enterprise.

Car-sharing has the potential to help households make more trips via transit, biking, or walking, instead of using the car as the default choice for every trip. But is the Zipcar acquisition good or bad news for the shift to cleaner, more efficient modes? The short answer is that, at this point, it’s anyone’s guess and could still play out either way.

Since its founding in 2000, Zipcar has gained 760,000 members, the New York Times reports. It operates in 20 metro areas in North America and Europe, and on many college campuses.

Steven Pearlstein at the Washington Post’s Wonkblog predicts that Avis will basically wreck Zipcar by making it operate more like the parent company and less like the upstart that has appealed to car-lite customers who want to avoid the expense and hassles of car ownership. He also raises anti-trust concerns, pointing to the increasing concentration of the car-rental business in the hands of a few large firms.

If Avis uses Zipcar to expand the availability of short-term rentals in areas where car-sharing can replace car-owning, however, this could turn out to be good news. (Places like the west side of Cleveland could certainly use a convenient car-sharing service, hint, hint).

Matt Yglesias over at Slate writes that the merger will put the Zipcar business on sounder footing (the company turned its first profit last year), and predicts that Avis’s resources will immediately help smooth out some wrinkles in Zipcar service:

Zipcar’s big outstanding problem is that demand for Zipcars is highly spiky. People who want to use a car to commute to work are going to want to own their own vehicle. And people generally need to work during weekdays. Which means that demand for spot rentals is very highly concentrated on the weekends, which makes it hard for Zipcar to manage inventory efficiently. Avis says that combining its fleet with Zipcar’s will make it much easier to meet those demand peaks, as individual vehicles can switch from hourly rental to traditional rental on a day-by-day basis.

Yglesias also raises the question of whether Avis will be as active as Zipcar in lobbying for progressive policy changes like reducing parking minimums. The larger company may bring more firepower to those debates, he writes, or it may lack the same intensity of interest as Zipcar.

In the third episode of our Moving Beyond the Automobile series, Streetfilms takes a look at a more efficient way to use cars. Unlike owning a car, which involves a large upfront purchase and low costs per trip, car-sharing allows people to evaluate the full cost of each car trip. When car-share members choose whether to drive, take transit, walk, or bike, the incentives guide them toward the most appropriate mode for that specific trip. Driving half a mile to pick up some milk starts to make a lot less sense.

Zipcar, a leading car-share company, reports that members save $600 a month compared to the costs of owning an automobile. They also walk and bike 10 to 15 percent more than they did before joining Zipcar.

So while car-sharing isn’t exactly “beyond the automobile,” it is a great way to help cut traffic, reduce the space taken up by private cars, and make city streets more efficient.

The Department of Transportation will soon be using Zipcars instead of city-owned vehicles, Mayor Bloomberg, Deputy Mayor Stephen Goldsmith and Transportation Commissioner Janette Sadik-Khan announced at a press conference yesterday. The initiative is intended to reduce unnecessary driving by DOT employees and could yield significant savings if expanded to the city’s entire passenger vehicle fleet. Symbolically, the city is also sending a message that owning a car might not be a wise financial decision.

Three hundred DOT employees will share 25 Zipcars during the workweek, which they’ll reserve online. Those 25 vehicles will replace 50 that had been owned by the department. At night and on the weekends, regular Zipcar members will have access to the vehicles, which will be stored in private garages in Lower Manhattan.

The car-sharing idea has been in the works for a while now. DOT put it out for competitive bidding a year ago and the plan made it into Goldsmith’s cost-cutting program in July. Now it’s ready to go.

At yesterday’s announcement, a lot of attention went to the savings and efficiency gains that car-sharing could bring. The city’s fleet is currently “a patchwork of standard operating procedures and tracking mechanisms, some of which are still paper-based,” said Bloomberg. This DOT pilot, he said, would save the City $500,000 over four years, and could be scaled up to the entire passenger vehicle portion of the city’s 26,000 vehicles.

Bloomberg also promised that switching to car-sharing will “reduce the congestion on our streets and the pollution in our air.” That may be the case with consumer car-sharing, which leads people to weigh the price of each car trip against other options, but it’s not quite clear whether switching to Zipcar will help DOT reduce the amount employees drive, since the agency is paying a fixed amount already.

Bloomberg said the main effect would be to discourage employees from commuting with agency vehicles — an improper use of city cars. Restrictions on when city workers can use the shared cars will keep most of them off the streets during peak commute hours. The mayor also hypothesized that having to walk to a public garage might be a disincentive to take unnecessary trips.

We’ll know the effect soon enough. Sadik-Khan said that GPS would be installed in the city’s Zipcars and used to measure whether the program is actually reducing driving. Bloomberg suggested that DOT also use the GPS data to find driving trips that could be done on transit. “If it turns out the subway is better, or the new M15 bus,” he argued, “maybe that’s the way to go.”